In my wasted youth, I read most of Robert A. Heinlein’s published writing. I cannot recommend doing that. But that inheritance from my younger self has me frustrated with the state of Discourse around his novel Starship Troopers. At the risk of talking about the orangutan, I have something to add which I am puzzled no one else seems to have said. I feel an itch over failings I see in both defenses & critiques of the novel.
Yes it is fashy
One cannot talk about fascist themes in the novel without addressing the other Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s film, a satire offered as if it were propaganda from a fascist society. Many Heinlein fans grumble, with some cause. The film cutting so directly against the novel whets my own appetite to see its strengths somehow presented in film. I am nerd enough to want to see a depiction of a capable Mobile Infantry in powered armor, and I am sentimental enough that I feel moved whenever I re-read how Flores dies on the way up.
But people who reject the film because the novel is Not Fascist At All misunderstand both the novel and fascism. The book is fashy as heck.
In the world of Troopers, civic vigor results from martial valor, because it restricts the franchise to people who have volunteered to fight in endless frontier wars.
According to Dubois, the teacher of the required History And Moral Philosophy class taught in high school, who speaks in Heinlein’s unmistakable Author Mouthpiece Voice, their political order emerged after ruthless brownshirts arrogated power to themselves to replace decadant liberal democratic governance, in an echo of the history of You Know What:
⋯ With national governments in collapse at the end of the XXth century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans. They had lost a war, most of them had no jobs, many were sore as could be over the terms of the Treaty of New Delhi, especially the P.O.W. foul-up — and they knew how to fight. But it wasn't revolution; it was more like what happened in Russia in 1917 — the system collapsed; somebody else moved in.
The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee. Just arbitrary at first — they trusted each other a bit, they didn’t trust anyone else. What started as an emergency measure became constitutional practice in a generation or two.
Dubois explicitly rejects our political order of universal human rights:
But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights’. The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature [⋯] And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture [⋯] a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ … and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.
These are fascist dreams. Considering them plausible — not even good, just plausible — is fashy thinking.
David Forbes’ superb long essay The Old Iron Dream (summarized here) situates Heinlein in a context of the far right strain in golden age science fiction; Noah Berlatsky observes how entangled far right fantasies and SF have been with each other. My favorite single commentary on Troopers is a series of long video-essays contextualizing Troopers in Heinlein, Verhoeven, and the essayist’s family (!) which defends having a soft spot for the novel while registering unmistakably fashy elements in its foundations.
But all that said, I do not read the novel as simply fascist propaganda, and taking Heinlein as a fascist badly misunderstands him.
Politics in Heinlein’s fiction gets weird
Heinlein’s harshest critics look past how protean and strange both his fiction and his personal politics really were. SF writer Charlie Stross’ comment Dread Of Heinleinism contextualizes the ideas expressed in his fiction.
Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).
In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).
We need to get that to get Heinlein’s portrayals of strange politics. One should never take him as simply advocating for the political order presented in any of his fictions.
Stross points to how many read Luna in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a libertarian utopian fantasy despite how it depicts an anarchist culture muddling through in the context of a very neglectful authoritarian rulership and very peculiar material conditions. In Double Star, the Emperor Of The Solar System offers a spirited defense of constitutional monarchy! I take these stories, and others, and Troopers as provocations, letting illiberal socieites make their best case for themselves on their own terms. Each is a different exercise in pushing against how the core principles of liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy are sacred cows in American society — inadmissible thought experiments indeed.
Part of why I read Heinlein in my youth is how I share his taste for looking the Devil in the eye, though I have learned that one must tread carefully. Heinlein was not careful enough, but his failures are interesting and twisty.
What I read RAH trying to do
The social & political order in Troopers has unmistakably fascist characteristics, but also includes a few breaks from the pattern of fascism. Importantly, it has no dictator, no cult of personality.
The core of its unique political system is now famous because Verhoeven’s explicitly satirical film adapation points directly to it:
- Only people honorably discharged from military service may vote (so people in service cannot)
- The military must accept all volunteers
- People in service may generally retire at will, but then they do not get the franchise
I read this What-If emerging from a tension between his romanticization of the military (which animates many of his stories, including my favorite) versus the liberatarian-unto-anarchist aspect of Heinlein’s worldview (evident throughout his work, loudest in Moon, which he wrote a few years after publishing Troopers).
Heinlein assumes not just that war emerges inevitably from human nature but that this reflects nobility, in protecting one’s society with violence. He dreads democracy devolving to lazy, destructive “bread & circuses” populism. Fashy sentiments. But Troopers also reflects Heinlein’s libertarian-ish disgust at conscription, and his sober dread of authoritarian alternatives to democracy. The world of Troopers tries to square the circle of these conflicting sensibilities through what Heinlein imagines could act as a tidy, clever system of checks-and-balances:
- Requiring service as a test & training for a sober and truly public-minded electorate addresses his anxieties about electoral democracy — to vote, one must demonstrate willingness to commit to the public good.
- Requiring that service accept every volunteer is meant to be quasi-democratic in spirit — since any can serve, none are disenfranchised. (I find it telling how in later commentary on the novel, Heinlein mis-remembered it as including the enfranchisement of people unsuited to the military by allowing for other forms of service.)
- People in service cannot vote, to keep them from bending the military away from serving society.
- Since voters have all Been There, that deters them from abusing the people in service.
But if one thinks about this with any depth, it falls apart.
Consider, f’rinstance, how this system would still allow a racist society to prevent the enfranchisement of people of color, simply by assigning Black & brown people in service to far more dangerous and degrading duty and refusing to ever discharge them from service. People of color would never become veteran voters who could prevent such abuses. Such shenanigans are so obvious to anyone familiar with the sham faux democracy of Jim Crow that one might suspect Heinlein of trickery.
I don’t. I see a naïve sincerity.
Heinlein’s good heart enabled this bad idea
If one has read much Heinlein, one cannot miss his disdain for bigotry. He wrote a lot of smart, capable women. He often would make that mid-20th-century move of revealing that a hero was a person of color midway through a work. But as Stross observes, he had the sincere commitmment combined with shallow analysis of injustices like racism & sexism characteristic of white men of the era. He could not see the misogyny threaded through his Strong Woman Characters, and wrote tone-deaf tranwrecks when making unmistakable attempts to stand against bigotry.
I submit that the potential for a racist version of the Troopers political order just did not occur to Heinlein. This kind of mistake is why we need to be no less wary the dangerous short-sighted-ness of white male privilege than we are wary of overt bigotry and cruelty.
Someone as fundamentally pessimistic about human nature as Heinlein presented himself as being would have seen this and countless other potential abuses of the system in Troopers. Heinlein’s fundamental decency paradoxically hobbled his imagination.
I suspect that decency also protected him from sliding down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. Among the anarchist fantasies, prescient warnings about American Christian theocratic totalitarianism, and other inadmissable thought experiments, Troopers was the high water mark of his fascist sensibilities in a writing career which lasted almost thirty more years. He probably would have voted for GWB in 2004 as the “lesser evil” had he lived so long, but I am confident that he would have hated Trump.
I think Heinlein’s libertarian-ish impulse won out because he wasn’t mean enough to turn to fascism.
The skeptical, satirical Heinlein
Heinlein’s faux-cynicism also reflects another virtue which softens my disgust at Troopers. Despite the smug, didactic, that’s-just-how-it-is tone of his writing, he was too cheerfully skeptical of everything to entirely buy any of the suggestions implied in his fiction, even from his own mouthpiece characters.
Some of his work is outright satirical — he named Stranger In A Strange Land explicitly as a satire. Even in works not intended as satires, the satirical note bubbles up often. I think of an aside in Friday depicting an independent Republic Of California with an exaggerated version of the state’s realworld ballot initiative process. In that example, though Heinlein lampoons “too much democracy”, the fictional political order is harmlessly goofy rather than sinister; he couldn’t help blunting the teeth of his own critique.
Indeed, a few defenders of Heinlein’s novel claim that Verhoeven’s film makes overt a critique of fascism covertly embedded in the novel. I don’t buy that, but Heinlein’s sensibility creates openings to read it that way. Consider a counter-reading which finds that the novel presents a dystopia of slavery and mind control.
There is evidence, however, that enslavement is ubiquitous in Starship Troopers in the form of coercive mass hypnosis. Such a plot device occurs in no other RAH book, so it can’t be dismissed as an accidental trope. RAH included it on purpose.[⋯]
The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. [⋯] to make him do what you want him to do. [⋯] But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. [⋯] that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. [⋯] other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say supply the control.Implication: the Politburo, made up of and selected by a single party state of Komsomol veterans, control the rest of the population through mass hypnosis. That’s not to say the book is not a paean to duty and patriotism, but that it’s primarily a cautionary tale of enslavement by mind-control of diligent patriots by Soviet-style communism. And, to that extent at least, the book is intended as a satire.
That linked post describes that reading to debunk it — and I don’t find the Mind Control Dystopia reading convincing myself — but the argument in full does demonstrate that reading as very available.
That satirical impulse makes it hard to measure the sincerity of Troopers ….
How plausible did Heinlein consider the political order in Troopers?
Having argued that depicting the world of Troopers does not mean that Heinlein thought it was a good society, we still have to grapple with him considering it a plausible society. That depends on invoking a lot of fashy ideas.
Dubois:
Law-abiding people hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.[⋯]
Were [those criminal kids] spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.[⋯]
the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’
Disgusting. Research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is harmful and indeed produces worse-behaved adults. This exemplifies authoritarian myths offered uncritically throughout the book.
Earlier I quoted Dubois rejecting universal human rights. In the context of the novel, it connects directly to the point above:
“⋯ Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’
“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.“
[⋯]
Librety is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes.
[⋯]
“⋯ There never was, there cannot be, a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenille criminal there are always one or more adult dilinquents — people of mature years who eiterh do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.
“And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”
Repellant.
And yet.
In that same passage, Dubois claims that moral philosophy has become an “exact science”:
⋯ the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.[⋯]
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.
Later, in the version of History And Moral Philsoopshy class taught to military officer candidates, the instructor expects students to do this.
Very well, is one prisoner, unreleased by the enemy, enough reason to start or resume a war? [⋯] This is an exact science. You have made a mathematical statement; you must give proof. [⋯] Bring to class tomorrow a written proof, in symbolic logic ⋯
Oh, really?
This science-fictional conceit of an exact science of morals is asserted by propagandists for the state. In moments like that — as when Heinlein gives us an Emperor rationalizing constitutional monarchy, or an anarchist philosopher recruiting revolutionaries on the Moon, or countless other advocates for Inadmissible Thought Experiments — I sense Heinlein’s tounge reflexively drifting toward his cheek, perhaps without him even realizing it, asking us:
”Do you believe that the people of this world are right to be so smug about having this all worked out?”
I sure don’t. And I suspect that Heinlein isn’t confident in them, either.
Bad and complicated
So. I want to embrace a nuanced reading of Heinlein’s relationship with the world of Troopers without brushing off problems with Heinlein’s thinking by calling him “complicated”.
Heinlein’s political provocations are always weird, often dumb, sometimes ugly, and in the particular case of Starship Troopers, odious.
And complicated.
Feral Historian and civic virtue
Added in September 2025, together with some refinements of the post above
The Feral Historian is a videoessayist who talks about the political implications of science fiction worldbuilding. He has a liberarian-ish sensibility which bubbles up in stuff like using the word “statist”, but he’s neither stupid nor a crypto-fascist. I think of him as the not-exactly-evil twin to left-ish Damien Walter (who says that in Verhoeven’s film, Buenos Aires was a false flag) and I enjoy and recommend checking out both of their commentaries.
Feral has a wry videoessay The Federations: It’s The Same Picture which asks whether the worlds of Troopers and Star Trek are really all that different. I think they are different, or at least should be if we are doing Trek correctly, but it’s exactly the kind of playful, astringent challenge which I talk about admiring from Heinlein at his best.
I want to look closely at his videoessay Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point, which raises some points worth digging into. It’s worth watching the whole thing, but here’s most of his punchline at the end:
- It’s asking us to consider that maybe voting — exercising political force — isn’t a right but a responsibility that should be earned by demonstrating in some way that it won’t be squandered or used to the deriment of society as a whole.
- This is illustrated perhaps most directly in the History And Moral Philosophy course that officer candidate Rico must attend late in the book. Unlike the public school version of it earlier, he must pass to the instructor’s satisfaction. [quoting the novel]: “If he gave you a downcheck, a board sat on you [⋯] deciding whether to give you extra instruction … or just kick you out and let you be a civilian.”
- Simply giving a few years of your life to the public good isn’t the point; it’s about molding responsible citizens. The whole thing is a civics course wrapped in an enlistment …
- … to make most people not bother, the uncommitted drop out, and the stubborn but genuinely unfit fail.
- It’s a process of tempering the politically active class to be worthy of the power they wield based on an understanding that people exercising that power without the commensurate responsibility and restraint brings slow ruin to their society.
- Instead of saying that citizens must be infused with virtue if the republic is to endure, Starship Troopers asks “what if only virtuous people can become citizens?” [⋯] Exercising the power of the state is a responsibility that must be earned, not a right that one simply acquires thanks to an accident of birth. It’s a story that says voting is not about having a voice but about directing state force. While today disenfranching people is seen as a grave injustice, the book shows us a world that views enfranchisement as a grave responsibility and filters its people to determine who will have that power and who will not.
- The overall point is that a healthy republic requires its citizens to have civic virtue. The book uses military service as the mechanism for presenting people with a choice […] It doesn’t have to be military service per se, but the mechanism requires that the choice be one that has a significant short-term downside commensurate with the power they receive on the other end.
There’s a lot going on in there.
Where does Feral think the society of Troopers locates civic virtue?
As I hope is clear from my original post, I agree with his read that the novel is, among other things, a thought experiment in how one can guarantee that an electorate has the necessary civic virtue to govern well. But there’s an ambiguity in how Feral describes the world of the novel doing that.
Feral titled his piece “service isn’t the point” and points 2, 3, and 5 suggest that he reads the society in the book believing that citizenship requires not just a process for identifying people with civic virtue, but a process which creates virtue in citizens.
But in points 4, 6, and 7, Feral suggests that Heinlein thought the choice to serve was a filter which demostrated the civic virtue of willingness to commit to the common good which the book’s society considers necessary for responsible citizenship.
Either way, Feral says in 7 that “it doesn’t have to be military service per se” that performs this function. But he underlines how the society presented in the book does require specifically military service.
I cannot speak for Feral Historian, but I can point to evidence from the novel which I think clearly answers what the society in the world of the novel thinks about these questions.
How the society in Troopers thinks about civic virtue
Before getting into where that society grounds the virtue necessary for voters, I’ll note again how their society is also interested in civic virtue short of what people need to vote responsibly. It talks about the virtue required to participate responsibly in society at all, holding that without beating children, society cannot be healthy.
I think the book offers clear answers to the ambiguities in Feral’s read. Their society grounds the necessary virtue for a voter not in the process of service, but in passing the test of choosing to serve. And they believe that only military service provides an adequate test.
The need to choose service
Consider this from Dubois, naming the need to identify people with the necessary virtue to vote rather than cultivate them:
“The unlimited democracies [of the twentieth century] were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority [⋯] No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority.”
Dubois explicitly names this as “civic virtue” in another segment from that lecture which made its way almost directly into the film adaptation:
Suddenly, he pointed his stump at me. “You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?”
“The difference,” I answered carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”
“The exact words of the book,” he said scornfully. “But do you understand it? Do you believe it?”
The specific necessity of military service
When Rico takes that second History And Moral Philosophy course as an officer candidate — the only classroom experience from officer training described in the novel — his instructor walks through the many “failures” of history demonstrating that only military service provides an effective test:
“⋯ Throughout history men have labored to place the sovereign franchise in hands that would guard it well and use it wisely, for the benefit of all. An early attempt was absolute monarchy, passionately defended as the ‘divine right of kings.’
“Sometimes attempts were made to select a wise monarch, rather man leave it up to God ⋯
“Historic examples range from absolute monarch to utter anarch; mankind has tried thousands of ways and many more have been proposed, some weird in the extreme such as the antlike communism urged by Plato under the misleading title The Republic. But the intent has always been moralistic: to provide stable and benevolent government.
“All systems seek to achieve this by limiting franchise to those who are believed to have the wisdom to use it justly. I repeat ‘all systems’; even the so-called ‘unlimited democracies’ excluded from franchise not less than one quarter of their populations by age, birth, poll tax, criminal record, or other.”
[⋯]
“The sovereign franchise has been bestowed by all sorts of rules — place of birth, family of birth, race, sex, property, education, age, religion, et cetera. All these systems worked and none of them well. All were regarded as tyrannical by many, all eventually collapsed or were overthrown.
“Now here are we with still another system … and our system works quite well. Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb. Why? Not because our voters are smarter than other people; we’ve disposed of that argument. ⋯
[⋯]
“⋯ So what difference is there between our voters and wielders of franchise in the past? We have had enough guesses; I’ll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.
“And that is the one practical difference.
“He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.”
Fashy.
Implied virtues
I’m grateful to Feral Historian for pointing me back to the officer candidates’ version of the History And Moral Philosophy class, because it clarified a point that the society in Troopers finds choosing military service a necessary test for a voter, but not a sufficient test.
As Feral points out, instructors in that class can not just flunk a soldier out of the class, if the soldier does badly enough the trainers will “kick you out and let you be a civilian”, losing the franchise.
In basic training, we get an episode in which a recruit strikes the company commander, foolishly talks himself into a hasty court-martial, and — denied legal counsel — he narrowly escapes hanging to be sentenced to “ten lashes and a Bad Conduct Discharge”. This inherits from military justice, and there are obvious reasons to consider those systems necessary. But they carry an extra weight when a dishonorable discharge denies a person’s vote.
So apropos of my point above about it not occurring to Heinlein how this system could easily maintain racist aparteid or other inequities in access to the franchise — since voters who survived military service could run the military unjustly to maintain a majority which supports that injustice — we see again how volunteering for military service is not in fact sufficent to become a voter. One must survive service. While in service one must demonstrate both obedience and ideological alignment with the regime.
Fashy.
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